Los Angeles Dodgers Digital Transformation Initiatives

About the Customer

The Los Angeles Dodgers are an American professional baseball team based in Los Angeles, California. The Dodgers compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the National League (NL) West division. Established in 1883 in Brooklyn, New York, the team moved to Los Angeles before the 1958 season. They played for four seasons at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum before moving to their current home of Dodger Stadium in 1962.

The Dodgers as a franchise have won six World Series titles and 23 National League pennants. 11 NL MVP award winners have played for the Dodgers, winning a total of 13 MVP Awards; eight Cy Young Award winners have pitched for the Dodgers, winning a total of twelve Cy Young Awards. The team has also produced 18 Rookie of the Year Award winners, twice as many as the next closest team, including four consecutive from 1979 to 1982 and five consecutive from 1992 to 1996.

Scope and Challenges

The Los Angeles Dodgers organization oversees approximately 1,200 seasonal gameday staff who work in areas such as ticket takers, ushers, security and merchandise sales and 375 full-time employees, including scouts in 27 states.

With a fluctuating and traveling workforce, the organization must handle a number of HR and payroll challenges, including managing multi-jurisdiction tax withholdings for player salaries and its employees across the country, and scaling its workforce at various times throughout the year. The Dodgers sought an HCM solution that would deliver the same advanced HR technology it saw other MLB teams using with success. The organization selected UltiPro and went live in March 2016.

Outcome and Implications

The Los Angeles Dodgers, a U.S. professional baseball team and a member club of Major League Baseball, is using UltiPro to help the organization achieve goals related to compliance, scaling growth, and workforce intelligence.

According to Hernandez, UltiPro has not only simplified the team’s payroll and helped ease compliance, but it has also improved the seasonal hiring experience for everyone involved.

Once employees are in UltiPro upon hiring, their information is immediately available for reporting and business intelligence. For ever-evolving organizations like the Dodgers, analytics are critical to decision making and forecasting.

Quotes

“Ultimate is very proud to have many sports organizations as customers, and we understand their personal and organizational challenges. The Dodgers are a great partner, and we are pleased that UltiPro is making life easier for their employees and the HR/Payroll team.” said Chris Phenicie, Chief Sales Officer, mid-market and strategic, at Ultimate.

“Every year, we have to reactivate hundreds of part-time employees in our system. Prior to UltiPro, these employees had to come into our facility, physically fill out paper documents, and update their information as necessary. With UltiPro’s functionality, the process will alleviate a lot of delays and inefficiencies. All our hires are able to submit their information online and make any adjustments directly in UltiPro. We can also securely deliver orientation documents to new hires for them to complete remotely, which makes the onboarding experience more convenient for them, and faster for us.” said Eric Hernandez, Vice President of Finance for the Los Angeles Dodgers.